The Last Magnus
by Regency
Summary: Spoilers for 'Pavor Nocturnus.' AU. Helen Magnus didn't get a warning, she got a second chance--all due to a man named Magnus Zimmerman.


Author: Regency

Title: The Last Magnus

Fandom: _Sanctuary_

Rating: G

Categories/Warnings: angst, AU, drama, implied character death

Pairing: implied Kate/Will

Spoilers: _Pavor Nocturnus_

Word count: ~2,190

Summary: Helen didn't get a warning, she got a second chance, all due to a man named Magnus Zimmerman.

Author's Notes: Inspired by the comment_fic prompt _Sanctuary, Magnus (PN), an older Magnus Zimmerman somehow ends up in the original canon verse_. Answers the prompt in a way I doubt the requester intended.

Disclaimer: I don't own any characters recognizable as being from _Sanctuary_. They are the property of their producers, writers, and studios, not me. No copyright infringement was intended and no money was made in the writing or distribution of this story. It was good, clean fun.

~!~

The name Magnus lived long after those who carried the Magnus blood.

He was as brilliant as he could have been expected to be with his father as his father and wilier than any could have imagined even with Kate Freelander as his mother. He'd grown up traversing the ice and knew night as his nursemaid.

He loved the wind in his face and had spent his young life projecting the mythical skyline of Old City over the snowy plains of the arctic colony. It was a sight he could almost see in his waking hours. There were few cars but the scent of automobile exhaust lingered like unfading memories only the older colonists recalled. They'd told their stories until they were frayed at the edges and sepia-toned with age. They were Magnus' memories now, but no sturdier for the exchange.

He was twenty-six the first time he saw concrete. It was in piles of debris, amid asphalt and wood and shards of bone. _There shouldn't have been any of that left,_ he thought, but what did he know? He was just a man who'd been brought up drinking boiled-down glacier ice and craving six months of twilight instead of three months of spring. The arctic felt like a world away.

He stared up at the seemingly swaying skeleton of the grand Sanctuary that had given him life—and taken it away—and was breathless. Although once upon a time it had hummed with purpose, it sighed mournfully now in disuse. The little boy that he had been wanted to run into its frail embrace and comfort it. It never should have been alone, or for so long. There were still things for this titan of a savior to do, still souls on Earth's sinking ship left to save.

Magnus slipped inside easily enough. There were no guards, no locks that had stood the test—and trials and tribulations—of time to stop him. If he'd been brought up that kind of man, he'd have sauntered in like his mother. Not that he knew how she would have, he didn't really remember her. He followed his intuition like her just the same and found his namesake's office as his father had—not that he knew that either. He'd always felt more than he'd ever known.

He sat back in the chair that all but crumbled under his weight. Shrugging it off, he made his way around the room, everything he laid fingers upon crumpling at the slightest contact. It was as though the entire place had bound itself together with bonds made of sheer will in order to pretend that the end hadn't really, finally, come. They persisted until someone came to test them and then, forced to see reason, broke.

Closing his eyes, he sighed. _Can't keep thinking about inanimate objects this way_. Magnus was used to living in his head and conversing only with himself. Being the namesake of the most brilliant woman to never save humanity had not been easy on him as a child; perhaps, it had even been harder than having no family at all to speak of. He was far from the only child left orphaned by the epidemic, but he was the only child to be born immune to it.

A gift from his would-be godmother, he liked to think though it was impossible for that to be true.

She'd been dead months before his birth but it had been her work, along with his blood, that had eventually saved what remained of the people of Earth. All 2.2 billion of them.

He'd been seventeen days shy of his twenty-first birthday when he found the cure. It had been buried among the last of her research, which his parents had sent along with him when he'd been ferried to the colony as a toddler. He guessed she had read it all so many times that it was a garble by the time she went to her death. It wasn't a garble to him; he'd noticed the answer after reading it once. He read it two dozen more times anyway, just to see.

One could say he'd grown up with an unhealthy affinity for the good doctor who'd given him his name. One could say that, certainly, but he wouldn't. Then again, Magnus generally didn't talk. He was happy enough with his silences; he liked to think he heard his mother in them, nervously chattering to cover what his father, ever the psychoanalyst, wouldn't say. He loved their phantoms but he liked to think he'd have loved them more.

Following his gut again, Magnus wandered into the laboratory where Helen Magnus, the one of the blood and brilliance, had worked and learned. He righted her overturned desk chair, blew dust from an old, old computer and tried to imagine what this place would have looked like in her day, any of her days. It had been home for a century. He thought it strange that he could imagine living that long.

He saw her at sixty-nine making use of her time. The life hadn't begun to seem too long yet. There was so much yet to study and Abnormals yet to save. She was beautiful, he would have had to see. In his own way, his father had always thought she was.

By one hundred, she would have begun to feel her age, even if she had not begun to show it. How many friends and lovers could one outlive before it wasn't worth the effort to make friends or fall in love? Either Magnus could have answered that; the number was pitifully small. They each had survived through much, but vulnerability remained their calling card.

He'd lain at the slush and mud-laden graves of two companions in his time. To her, it would have seemed a pittance. To him, it was existence. While humanity had persisted, it wasn't stronger for it. Those who'd run farthest fastest had perished caring for those they'd brought along. Magnus had been that kind of burden; he hadn't matured to be that kind of man. It could have been his mother, his father, or his doctor's influence. He couldn't say, he'd never know, but he'd ventured into the flagging heart of Old City anyway, just to see.

By the age of 134, he thought she must have been unspeakably lonely. Apart and separate from the world around her, bound to it by a calling and her honor, there was still no one to share it all with. She had friends, who eventually died; colleagues, who retired and/or died; and, she must have had her fill of true love after the first. She'd been unspeakably lonely and she'd chosen to become mother to an extraordinary child to change that.

Some part of him wished he could have been that extraordinary child. On the other hand, he wouldn't have bene a Zimmerman-Freelander otherwise and he couldn't imagine being anything else.

It sufficed to say that in his many years, he'd dreamed of Ashley, too. And of Henry, of the Big Guy, of Druitt, and Nikola Tesla. There wasn't a ghoul or good fellow who hadn't woken him from rapt sleeps with their presence. Long dead, all of them, but they'd all marked him at one time. The lady Magnus most of all. She was the inexplicable warmth he knew in a place so cold, the one he pretended was safety where there was none.

He wished he could have imagined his younger self in his mother's arms, but he hadn't spent a lifetime hearing about her. She'd been a footnote in a broken history. It was Magnus he had heard about, scorn and awe and regret all tethered together in a way his growing mind still failed to fully comprehend. They hadn't really hated her because she'd failed; they'd hated her because she'd finally succeeded. Her fondest wish had been to die and she had, she'd just left the world to follow her.

_I doubt she ever wanted that_, he thought and knew instinctively that he was right. To most, she would never exist as more than a cautionary tale of madness and genius, but she had been more than that to him. She'd been the teacher he never had in his little collapsible hut of a school. She'd been the crisp, lilting voice that whispered hair-raising adventures in his ears when all the other motherless children slept and he never could. She'd been next to him on the roof of Sanctuary, staring at the skyline he had only dreamed of amid a life that had ceased to exist when she did.

As his mother was against fear and his father against idleness, Helen Magnus was his totem against impossibility. There existed nothing that Magnus Zimmerman couldn't do—or undo—so long as he remembered her. That included, well, this…

He cleared his throat, wanting to believe. "I know what happened," he said aloud to the wide open room with a gaping maw where the roof used to be and useless daylight pouring in.

Nothing happened. He wasn't sure what exactly he'd expected. He wasn't sure he'd done it right or if it even could be done.

"My godmother…the Magnus before me, she made a mistake, I know she did. I don't know what specifically but I know that she did something to cause all this." He looked up with his mother's eyes, noting how the sun truly was useless now. He discerned the color blue yet no true light, almost as if everything around him had been cast in black and white.

"She didn't want this, I promise you. She wasn't a bad person, but a tired and lonely one. I can understand that. One can live too long." He rubbed his face, displacing the wire frames that he didn't need but never forgot to wear. "I do understand. Please forgive her for being human."

The words felt so weak in the scheme of bringing death to billions the world over. Helen Magnus had been the Typhoid Mary of all time. She'd all but brought about the mass extinction of _homo sapiens sapiens_. Those lower in the food chain would surely have thanked her. No one else had or would. Her last heir on Earth, in name if not indeed, knew that for an immortal woman she'd had a disastrously mortal heart. It had been their downfall.

As an entrancing mist formed in the air before him, he prayed that luck had perished with her. In this life, it was the last thing he needed.

~!~

Without fear or purpose of evasion, Magnus Henry Zimmerman stepped off the elevator and into a different time. The corridor was orange with the sunlight leaking in through the windows and the air was alive with conversations he could imagine but only half-hear. He almost wanted to take a step back and send the boxcar down, back to what was familiar where the dead were well and truly dead even if they still walked.

He hadn't expected his spectral ploy to work; he hadn't expected that ancient gods forgave. But they had and he'd been left stranded out of time without a home—again. The world had gone on, Magnus, his Magnus, had chosen selflessly, and he had never been born. It was the height of day and this former little boy sorely missed his blanket of stars. He didn't know where he belonged. No, more precisely, where he belonged didn't exist and never had. He reasoned that it wasn't ever supposed to.

_I guess that's all right_, he told himself and got back on the elevator.

He stared up at the camera and wondered if they could see him or if he was as much a ghost of legend as each of them had come to be. He caressed the walls, free of soot and dust and blood. He scuffed the floor with his old, too-tight boots and thought it would have made an all right bed. He didn't see amenities the way he thought his parents would have—would…did.

They saw a temporary location, a way station, transportation. Always temporary, never forever. Magnus saw home. It was the only thing he could remember from the future that would never be, this great hulking edifice that would only falter but never die. In the only year when he'd been loved, it had been here. In the only year when he'd been told of his namesake in affectionate, honest terms, he'd called his place his cradle.

Just for a second, before the doors closed, he thought he'd spied his mother's face, heard her laugh, felt her smile. It was more than he'd ever had. Or ever would.

As he disappeared into the place where things and people and love went when they ceased to be, he guessed that was all right, too. If he had to die when all the rest lived, there were worst places to disappear into. It was the Sanctuary For All after all and he was someone, too.

Or at least he had been.

…was.

…might have been.


End file.
